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Baseball Books Reviewed

Baseball Books Reviewed

As "The Literary Baseball Magazine," Spitball has undertaken as part of its basic mission the task of reviewing as many deserving baseball books as possible, with empathy, appreciation, and authority. On this website and in the magazine itself we attempt to serve as the baseball book reviewer of record. Publishers and Authors NB: to have your baseball book considered for review on this website and in Spitball Magazine, to have your book listed on the "Current Baseball Books" page of this website, and to have the book automatically considered for the CASEY Award, please send a review copy to:

Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine

536 Lassing Way

Walton, KY 41094

Recently Reviewed Baseball Books

Leo Durocher: Baseball's Prodigal Son Paul Dickson, winner of Spitball’s 2012 CASEY award for Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick,
tosses another gem with Leo Durocher:
Baseball’s Prodigal Son. In Durocher,
Dickson captures the essence of a highly controversial player/manager whose Hall
of Fame career spanned the rough and tumble 1920s to the advent of free agency.
If you fancy yourself even a casual baseball fan then this book is a must read.

Casey Stengel: Baseball’sGreatest Character by MartyAppelCasey Stengel: Baseball's Greatest Character is the latest baseball book by Marty Appel, the former Director of
Public Relations for the New York Yankees and author of the 1996 CASEY
Award-winning book Slide, Kelly, Slide.
The many books about Casey Stengel’s baseball career create a challenge for any
biographer to present a new perspective on the legendary Yankee manager. Read More.

Michael Leahy’s The Last Innocents awakens feelings of
empathy that we all have for someone. In Leahy’s case, we empathize with the
starting line up and pitching staff of the Los Angeles Dodgers. It’s in Leahy’s
book that we get to know players like Maury Wills, Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale,
and Wes Parker. By the end of the book, readers not only have a better
understanding of who these men were on the field, but who they were off the
field, too. Read More.

I love to read baseball books, but I have a hard time reading about the minor leagues. I find books about the minors to be dull, tedious, and unexciting. That’s why I was surprised by how much I enjoyed George Gmelch’s Playing With Tigers, a memoir about his days as a minor leaguer in the 1960s Read More.

It’s
ironic that I find myself strongly admiring the 1986 New York Mets after
reading Erik Sherman’s The King of
Queens: Life Beyond Baseball with the ’86 Mets. After all, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool
Red Sox fan who still has somber memories of the 1986 World Series that saw my
boys in red come within a strike of winning it all for the first time in
sixty-eight years. Read More.

A few days
before Christmas, Charles Fountain was gracious enough to sit down with me and
discuss his latest book The Betrayal,
a thorough and lively book about the famed 1919 Black Sox scandal involving
eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox baseball team who took money to
deliberately lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Anyone who has read
W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, or has
seen Field of Dreams, the film based
on the novel, knows the story of the Black Sox scandal, especially about
Shoeless Joe Jackson, the most famous of the eight players permanently banned
from baseball by newly-appointed baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis
in 1920. Jackson has emerged as a folk hero in the last thirty years thanks to
Kinsella’s novel and subsequent film, encouraging hundreds of loyal fans to
lobby for his ban to be lifted so he can take his rightful place the Baseball
Hall of Fame. A stellar World Series performance included a .375 batting
average, twelve runs batted in, and the only home run in the world series,
strongly implying that Jackson, while having confessed to taking money from the
gamblers, decided the disregard his promise to deliberately play poorly.Read More

If asked to pick
a song that effectively summarized the life of Billy Martin, I’d choose U2’s “I
Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” But since no one asked me, I’ll use
it as the beginning of my book review of Bill Pennington’s new biography Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius. Pennington’s
latest bookshows two different sides
to the famed New York Yankee player and manager who was no stranger to
controversy, the first side showing a win-at-all-costs warrior who took
advantage of every opportunity to be a better ballplayer, and the other side
being a tortured individual whose life ended tragically before he could finally
find the perfect balance between his personal and professional life that he’d
spent a lifetime looking for.Read More

Reviewed by: Mark Schraf (July 10, 2015)Recently a steady stream of revisionist evidence has surfaced suggesting that perhaps Ty Cobb wasn’t nearly as maniacal in his baseball genius and personal life as he has been universally portrayed for at least one generation, maybe two.From the revelation that Al Stump’s biographical work with Cobb in the early 1960’s was essentially fiction to the 2013 Casey Award winning book written by his grandson Herschel Cobb titled Heart of a Tiger and 2015’s Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen, a more balanced, normal, less pathological picture of the famous and infamous Georgia Peach is emerging. Pity. Read More

Reviewed by Mark Schraf (January 30, 2015)Any baseball bibliophile worth his weight in dust jackets is familiar with the rich history of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and in particular the wonderful anecdote in Peter Golenbock’s Casey winning evocation, BUMS, in which Walter O’Malley is lumped by a pair of Brooklynite literary stars named Jack Newfield and Pete Hamill with Stalin and Hitler as one of the three worst human beings in history.Now, it should be noted that O’Malley finished third on both independently-produced lists, but still, if there was ever a figure in baseball in need of a comprehensively objective treatment, it was the Big Oom. (Michael D’Antonio’s fine 2009 effort, True Blue, is a solid but perhaps overtly laudatory treatment). And for the better part of the last two decades (!), former SABR President Andy McCue had been dedicated to the task of ferretting out the truth from the vitriol, to present a picture of the man who changed the landscape of professional sports in America and almost singlehandedly dragged the business of baseball into the 20th century. Read More

Sometimes all we really want is some comfort food. Familiar and tasty, even when prepared by following the recipe to a T, but in the hands of a talented, inventive chef, a good meal can be elevated to fine cuisine. And when it comes to mystery fiction, the dishes are meant to be served up just as you’d expect, with the different genres like a cozy or police procedural or caper just as distinct as shepherd’s pie is from pumpkin pie. So when Max Everhart’s novel Go Go Gato is described as a classic neo-noir detective tale, it’s definitely meant as a compliment, and when his main character, former minor league phenom turned private investigator Eli Sharpe, easily slides into the traditional smart-witted, sarcastic, borderline alcoholic charmer mold, it’s like sinking your teeth into the perfect chicken fried steak. Read More

Brooks: The Biography of Brooks Robinson, by Doug WilsonReviewed by Scott Ferkovich (August 4, 2014)Brooks Robinson was one of the finest third basemen in baseball history. A first-ballot Hall of Famer, he is arguably the most popular athlete ever to wear the uniform of the Baltimore Orioles, his only team in 23 years in the major leagues. He played in 18 All-Star Games, was the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 1964, and won 16 Gold Gloves. He starred on some of the most dominant teams of the last fifty years, including two World Series winners. His fielding heroics in the 1970 Fall Classic made him a one-man highlight film, and he has set the standard for excellence at the hot corner. Read More

Stars & Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76 by Dan EpsteinReviewed by Mark Schraf (July 23, 2014)It’s just plain disturbing when your childhood memories start to appear in history books.But it’s also very interesting to compare what you remember to what actually occurred, to be shown the often surprisingly huge difference between your individual perception and true reality after it’s been filtered through the prism of historical reference. And, assuming the subject is worthy, that journey back in time will only be worth the time, money, and shelf space invested if that the prism – i.e., the author – is an entertaining combination of a great tour guide and your favorite professor in college: knowledgeable, well-versed, an expert on the subject, and a good storyteller to boot. Read More

1954: The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Basefall Forever, by Bill MaddenReviewed by Scott Ferkovich (July 14, 2014) 1947 is remembered as the year when Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. From a historical standpoint, however, Major League Baseball’s integration is often portrayed as if it began, and ended, with Robinson, as if his rookie year with the Brooklyn Dodgers opened the floodgates for black players, and from that moment on all other teams willingly rushed to fill the void on their own rosters. But that was hardly the case. As of spring training, 1954, a full seven years A.R. (After Robinson) half of the sixteen major league clubs still did not feature a black athlete on their rosters. Read More

The Closer, Mariano Rivera with Wayne CoffeyReviewed by Tom Eckel (June 7, 2014)Everything about this book exudes calm and class. In the mail order retail business sellers work very hard on the customers’ “box opening experience”. Little, Brown has certainly made a statement with this book. Beneath the dust jacket you discover a dark blue, ribbed cover with a facsimile of Rivera’s autograph slanted in the lower right corner. Inside the front cover the first few (and last few) pages are a dark blue with white pinstripes and River’s “42”, in white, elegantly positioned. Inside, the words and pacing reveal an uncommon man. Sincere and humble and controlled. Read More

We humans are, in general, a fairly myopic bunch. We assume that the way things are right now is pretty much the way they’ve always been. Just ask a teenager if they’ve ever heard of an 8-track cassette. Or a reel-to-reel tape player. Heck, there’s absolutely no way they’d have any idea what a vinyl record was if it weren’t for hip-hop DJ scratching.Just two years ago, there was a raging argument as to exactly who was truly most valuable in the American League – was it the first Triple Crown winner in 45 years, the Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera, or Anaheim’s rookie sensation Mike Trout, the darling of the sabermetric crowd. It seems impossible to fathom that a Triple Crown season – just the 16th time it’s been accomplished in the game’s long history – might not be the best season in a given year, although it’s far from a guarantee that the TC = MVP. Just ask Ted Williams or Lou Gehrig or Chuck Klein or Rogers Hornsby. Read More

The typical contemporary baseball fan looks at Johnny Evers’ lifetime batting average of .270 and concludes that Evers’ Hall of Fame credentials are fraudulent, that he rode into Cooperstown on the coat tails of some catchy baseball verse by Franklin P. Adams with the refrain “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” The poem did achieve a bit of fame and is still anthologized regularly, but Evers was not dependent on it for his own celebrity. Nor was his reputation made by the infamous Merkle incident, although the unorthodox brilliance of the play did boost Evers’ standing in the public eye. No, Johnny Evers in his day was simply considered a great baseball player, the heart and soul of the great Chicago Cubs teams of the period, who was entirely deserving of baseball’s highest accolades. In Dennis Snelling’s new biography of “The Crab,” this basic truth about the career of Johnny Evers comes through plainly and convincingly (even though Snelling doesn’t even bother trying to bolster the case for Evers as a Hall of Famer); and no one who reads Johnny Evers: A Baseball Life (McFarland) will ever hold the subject in low esteem again. Read More

Did you know that Art “Superman” Pennington played ten of his 15 professional seasons for the Chicago American Giants in the Negro American League, and the remainder in Mexico, Venezuela and Cuba? Did you know he batted over .300 on 9 occasions? Or that he hit a home run off Dizzy Dean and struck out against Satchel Paige? And, in 1959, in the minors leagues, he beat 1959 AL batting champ Harvey Kuenn by 9 points for the batting title. Read More

The Fight of Their Lives by John RosengrenReviewed by: Tom Eckel (April 6, 1014)“I wish he could have been my catcher.” That’s how Juan Marichal ended his eulogy at John Roseboro’s funeral, and John Rosengren ended the book.In 1965, TV cameras broadcasting a Giants-Dodgers game recorded perhaps the most violent moment in modern baseball history when Giants’ pitcher Juan Marichal clubbed Dodgers’ catcher Johnny Roseboro in the head with a baseball bat, igniting a huge brawl. Read More

Going the Distance by Michael JoyceReviewed by: Mark Schraf (December 2, 2013)If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody’s around to hear or record it, does it make a sound?Of course, the answer is there’s no way to know for sure. However, if a baseball book is published, but not too many people know about it, does that mean it isn’t very good? This question we do have a sure answer for, and the journey of Michael Joyce’s challenging novel, Going the Distance - both into print and into consideration for this year’s Casey Awards – is as remarkable as his brilliant style. Read More

Quick! Take a glance at your baseball bookshelf, and see how many DiMaggio books you own. You have Kostya Kennedy’s 56, the 2011 Casey winner, don’t you, as well as Richard Ben Cramer’s 2000 Casey nominee, the brilliant Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life? How ‘bout Joe and Marilyn by Roger Kahn, or David Halberstam’s The Teammates, or even the more elusive Joe DiMaggio: A Bio-Bibliography by Jack B. Moore, Casey nominees all?

Of course, there are dozens more books of varying quality and utility written about at least one member of baseball’s most famous family, so perhaps the greatest challenge that veteran writer Tom Clavin was able to conquer was to convince Harper Collins to publish yet another addition to the DiMaggio canon. Read More

One of the reasons Mike Shannon and the late Jim Harrison decided way back in 1980 to launch their quixotic endeavor named SPITBALL: The Literary Baseball Magazine was due in large part to the uninformed snobbery of many literary editors and critics, so many of whom couldn’t accept baseball as a proper vehicle for serious literary writing. One can almost hear Marianne Moore, Bernard Malamud, Robert Coover, John Updike, Donald Hall, Mark Harris, and thousands other marvelous poets, novelists, short story authors, and essayists of the day, in one voice, respond with the time-honored, universal descriptor major leaguers have used for a bad call or poor performance since they first started keeping score: “That’s horse%&*t!” Read More

Reviewed by Mark Schraf (October 16, 2013)“I am not an artist,” he was known to say, “I am a cartoonist.”Never were both absolute truth and absolute untruth uttered more succinctly, but when these are the words famed sports cartoonist Willard Mullin used to describe his own work and profession, it’s probably not prudent to disagree. Perhaps the best way to reconcile the conundrum was perfectly addressed in Fantagraphics Books’ latest baseball effort,Willard Mullin’s Golden Age of Baseball: Drawings 1934-1972,written by Hal Bock and Michael Powers, a sumptuous, comprehensive homage to a man aptly named by his peers as “Sports Cartoonist of the Century”. Read More

Reviewed by: Jack Greiner (May 28, 2013)It may be an overstatement to say that Smoky Joe Wood was the Forrest Gump of Major League Baseball, but not much of one. He played with Babe Ruth. He was on the Indians when Ray Chapman was killed by the pitch thrown by Carl Mays. His teammate Bill Wambsganss turned an unassisted triple play in the 1920 World Series. Gerald Wood’s biography – “Smoky Joe Wood The Biography of a Baseball Legend” – traces the history of Wood’s major league career, along with his pre-major league days as well as his life after the show as the coach of the Yale Bulldogs. It’s a comprehensive history of the man and his time. Read More

Swinging '73: Baseball's Wildest SeasonReviewed by: By Andrew O'Toole (May 3, 2013)When I was offered the opportunity to review a book on the 1973 baseball season my first reaction was, “Should be lots of Tug McGraw; I’m in.” In Mathew Silverman’s Swinging ’73: Baseball’s Wildest Season, the reader gets McGraw and much more. On the surface the hardly memorable ’73 campaign is an unlikely subject for a full length book. Silverman, however, makes his material work for him. The beauty of a seemingly mundane season lies in its ordinariness and in Swinging ’73 we are introduced to a cast of irrepressible personalities, notable events, and memorable episodes. Read More

The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark FidrychReviewed by: Mark Schraf (April 23, 2013)58 games. That’s it. That’s the sum total of major league appearances for Detroit Tigers pitcher Mark Fidrych, who won 19 games in his Rookie of the Year campaign of 1976, but just 10 more over the next four injury-plagued seasons. It’s an oft-seen arc, especially for baseball pitchers, where arms can be as fragile as celebrity itself, but in a day and age when instant fame and fortune is commonplace, what is so special about the career and life of yet another ROY winner who didn’t plan out (remember John Castino? Doug Metzger? Carl Morton? Joe Charboneau? Harry Byrd?) that warrants a full-length biography? Read More

Heart of a Tiger: Growing Up with My Grandfather, Ty CobbReviewed by: Mike Shannon (March 26, 2013)Ty Cobb, the defiant monomaniacal competitor and brilliant batsman, is one of the most famous players in baseball history. He has been written about more extensively than any other player excepting perhaps Babe Ruth, his quasi-contemporary and main challenger; and much of this writing, especially Charles Alexander’s monumental biography published in 1984 by Oxford University Press, has been devoted to debunking myths about the subject. Most recently, researchers have called into question the accuracy of the sensationalized portrait painted by Al Stump of the elder Cobb as a half-crazed out-of-control wild man. Nevertheless, the primary public image of Cobb as pretty much a mean bastard has remained intact, which makes the latest book about the former Detroit Tigers great, a memoir by his grandson Herschel, a most welcome addition to the Ty Cobb canon. Read More

Long ShotReviewed by: Mike Shannon (March 18, 2013)Every Hall of Fame player or Hall of Fame-worthy player deserves not only an autobiography and a definitive biography but an apologia as well, assuming he wants and needs one. Future Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza probably needed the latter, and a good one at that, and he gets it here in Long Shot with the help of collaborator Lonnie Wheeler. What does Piazza, the greatest offensive catcher in baseball history with 427 home runs and a .308 lifetime batting average, have to feel defensive about? Well, plenty as it turns out... Read More

No one should be surprised that baseball today reflects many of the main characteristics of our culture, but the idea bears repeating nonetheless. This connection exists even in the province of baseball literature and baseball books, and a perfect example of it can be found in The Rotation: A Season with the Phillies and One of the Greatest Pitching Staffs Ever Assembled by Jim Salisbury and Todd Zolecki; a book about a hyped-up situation that had to be started and worked on even as the situation came into being. The Rotation is hardly the first baseball book to attempt to capitalize on the latest hot topic, but it did run a greater risk than normal in... Read More

Neil Lanctot's recent biography Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella, would seem to refer to the great catcher's life before and after an automobile accident left him a paraplegic, ending his baseball playing career in 1958, 10 years after he became one of the breakthrough group of African American major leaguers with the Brooklyn Dodgers. However, the book's title may also convey two additional double entendres: one concerning his dual ethnicity as an African-American and Italian-American, and another perhaps his two baseball careers as a veteran of both the Negro and Major professional leagues. In any event, themes of duality are consistently revisited throughout this well-balanced assessment of Campanella's complex life. Read More

The book’s illustrations – of course, the main vehicle used to move a graphic novel’s narrative forward - are a joy from first page to last, both in the quality and skill of the mostly representational artwork, but also in the playfulness and originality of the panel choices. Seamlessly melding art with the written word, Shannon employs a chronological structure, beginning with the dark events surrounding the 1919 World Series between the victorious Cincinnati Reds and the infamous Black Sox, to introduce Hutchinson's story. Read More

Captivating, revealing, and dramatic, "21" accomplished through art, creative use of informed imagination, and pure passion, far more than I thought possible from a graphic novel. I believe I now have a more complete picture of Roberto Clemente, but not of his statistics, or even his style of play, or of his place in baseball history. I have a truer sense of his heart. Read More

We are SPITBALL: The Literary Baseball Magazine, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that we are passionate about fine writing, especially about baseball. And while literature can be defined as broadly as one might wish, there is nothing that gets us as pumped up as finding an exquisitely written baseball book, regardless of the subject. Bottom of the 33rd is one of those special books, and Dan Barry is one of those special authors. Read More

Anyone who has seen Albert Pujols hit a home run--and there have been ample opportunities since in his ten + years in the major leagues he has hit over 400 of them--should have noted two things: the grace and power of his swing and his gesture as he crosses home plate, looking and pointing skyward. Those two things define who he is: a gifted athlete who works hard to make the best use of his gift and a man who believes in giving thanks to God for bestowing it on him. As he has said: "Baseball is simply my platform to elevate Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior." Read More

Of all the numerous unique aspects that the game of baseball has going for it, none is more important or more fascinating that the ball itself. Our familiarity with this most commonplace of all sports objects belies just how little we average fans know about it. The antidote to this pervasive ignorance is to be found in the first book to take as its entire subject the baseball itself, Zack Hample’s The Baseball: Stunts, Scandals, and Secrets Beneath the Stitches. Read More

Given the fulsome nature of the sub-title it hardly seems necessary to say what this book is about, but in the event there is any question let me quote two sentences from the front flap of the dust jacket: ”Is the face of American baseball throughout the world that of goodwill ambassador or ugly American? Has baseball crafted its own image or instead been at the mercy of broader forces shaping our society and the world?" Read More

It’s a cliché but true nonetheless that the typical fan turns to sports for entertainment and a pleasurable escape from the headaches of "real" life. Fans don’t like it when the curtain is pulled aside and they are forced to admit the fact that the sports world is infected with some of the same problems afflicting the larger society: greed, corruption, dishonesty, drug use, etc. Read More

He captures the inner dialog of a father who wants desperately to give his only son the very best possible chance to succeed in the game he so passionately loves. The game descriptions and conversation are both spot on. Characterization is strong, with no cardboard characters to be found. Read More

In Cardboard Gods, Wilker moves us beyond baseball cards as monetary investment to place us inside his Transcendentalist-esque realization of their ability to transcend time and make tangible a golden age of childhood. He takes us to a simpler time when older brothers were idolized and happiness could be found in a nickel pack of cards. Read More

Of all the major team sports baseball is the one which has engendered the most variations upon a theme in terms of playing the game. Far from requiring nine to a side, kids, by themselves or in the smallest of groups, have found innumerable ways to replicate the baseball playing experience, often using something other than a baseball to do so. Corks, rocks, bottle caps, golf balls, tennis balls, rubber balls, and even rubber balls sawed in half (among others) have all served as substitutes for actual baseballs, but the king of all baseball substitutes is a specially-made plastic ball, known as the Wiffle ball. Read More

If you're a kid in a small town in the Dominican Republic and you want to play baseball but have no equipment, you use whatever might be available. You make a ball out of old socks, a bat out of a stick, and a glove out of a milk carton. Read More

Any book that sets out to name the top ten fastball pitchers of all time is sure to provoke controversy, and Tim Wendel accomplishes just that in his somewhat quirky, somewhat biased, freewheeling, and always entertaining book, High Heat. Read More

Heretofore there have been only a couple of books about Roger Maris; including Maury Allen's Roger Maris: A Man for All Seasons, published in the wake of Maris' untimely death at the age of 51 in December of 1985, and Maris at the Bat, a collaborative account with Jim Ogle of his sixty-one home run season in 1961. Thus, it is high time that a more definitive biography, such as Roger Maris: Baseball's Reluctant Hero, should be attempted. Read More

Reviewed by: Mike Shannon (Jan. 25, 2010)
The baseball mystery novel is a tricky proposition, a combination of delicious tastes difficult to mix successfully. For readers who are more fans of mystery than of baseball, too much who-done-it is an impossibility. On the other hand, when the baseball is subordinate to the mystery, fans of fiction about baseball first and foremost may finish such a book feeling a little dissatisfied. The latest baseball mystery to deal with this literary conumdrum is Rick Wilber's Rum Point: A Baseball Novel. Read More

Given the title, it's not surprising that Achorn's book is a seasonal account of Radbourn's best season on the hill (actually there was no mound back then for pitchers to throw from, an example of the type of detail about the way the game was played in Radbourn's era that Achorn expertly delineates for the reader), which is also the best season any pitcher ever had (from a strictly won-loss record point of view)! But it is also a start-to-finish biography and one which, though seemingly condensed compared to the space given the one year of 1884, is perhaps as complete a biography of the man as we are ever likely to get. Read More